


A Binding Embrace

by Blacksquirrel



Category: Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001)
Genre: 18th Century, Bondage, Character of Color, Community: choc_fic, Established Relationship, Interracial Relationship, M/M, Military, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-09-11
Updated: 2007-09-11
Packaged: 2017-10-02 21:20:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blacksquirrel/pseuds/Blacksquirrel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mani and Fronsac sustain each other across two decades, two continents, and two very different wars.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Binding Embrace

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to my excellent beta kitsune13 who saved Mani from a terrible literary fate. If you haven't seen Brotherhood of the Wolf, what's stopping you! What's not to love about a French 18th century, Native American kung fu, romantic monster movie? But for those of you still holding out, pictures at [The IMDB](http://imdb.com/title/tt0237534/photogallery-ss-0) and this [Fan Page](http://alicia-logic.com/capspages/caps_viewall.asp?titleid=60) provide a nice sense of the film's striking use of color and cinematography, as well as the glorious hotness of Our Heroes. For an absolutely breathtaking visual summation, see Gwyneth's vid [Fraternité](http://www.gwynethr.net/) (this main page includes directions for obtaining the site password).
> 
> Choc_Fic Prompt: Sept 11 - 5. Brotherhood of the Wolf, Fronsac/Mani: Pinning down, preventing movement: "Give me one friend, just one, who meets the needs of all my varying moods." -- Esther Clark

**A Binding Embrace**

Of the two, Mani possessed the greater evenness of temper, although this had not always been the case.

In the days of the war Mani would as likely greet him with a raised fist as a smile, so Fronsac smiled tightly for both of them, and took Mani's horror and anger on the chin as the bodies of comrades, sisters, lovers, and friends piled up around them. Although Fronsac had planted his dreams deeply in the soil of New France, Mani's eyes spoke to him with vicious eloquence of losing, not a playground, but an entire world, a home, a life.

In the evening, Fronsac bathed their blood, sweat, and powder-strewn faces, hands, and aching bodies, holding steadily as excesses of disgust and loss attempted to escape Mani's quivering flesh through a thousand conflicting impulses to motion. Fronsac laid the cloth and washbasin to the side, and pressed his cheek and palms to Mani's side, from where he knelt at his feet. Then finally, at Mani's nod, Fronsac bound quivering hands behind Mani's back and lanced the gathering grief, drawing it out with the scratch of his calloused caresses and the balm of his pleading lips, while Mani's arching neck and taut biceps strained beneath him in one last refusal of the ache of release.

Gathering specimens alone together, they spent many days in sunshine, and many nights bathed in warm starlight, but war always found them again.

When Mani confessed one night that the spirit connecting people and animals, the earth and the sky, must surely have perished for such destruction to rage around them, Fronsac gathered Mani's unresisting limbs and proceeded to push animation back into Mani's listless heart, penetrating the very center of his doubt until pain and rage came flooding out on a stream of sweat and semen and _LifeLifeLife_. And Mani shuddered, because surviving to feel this pleasure, as everything else faded away, had become another kind of pain. Fronsac's warm breath danced across Mani's chest and he whispered into the night, "I have long since given up on my god, Mani, but when I look at you I want to believe in something again. There is yet a spirit alive in you that not even I can deny." Mani's chest rose and fell on a deep sigh, and he forced movement back into his limp arm to reach up and cup Fronsac's earnest face.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When they returned to Versailles from Gévaudan with a wolf in beast's clothing, Mani alone recognized the poisonous path by which Fronsac's regret had turned inward, leaving him wracked with uncharacteristic shame and doubt. They quickly removed to Paris after attending the King, and busied themselves with operas and gardens, always on the arm of the most scandalous actresses and courtesans, but it was not the same city that Fronsac so gladly showed Mani before; its lights and arts had not diminished, but Fronsac's enthusiasm had drained, leaving him sallow as the faces of the beasts' mutilated victims, beneath a stitched-on façade of resolute joviality.

On dreary afternoons they haunted the fencing salle d'armes, as they had done for months before they left to investigate the beast. Mani watched from across the hall, where he tutored young counts and men of letters in hand-to-hand, as Fronsac's foil, once surprisingly dangerous, failed to contain his unrest, and he lost to fencing masters and old friends alike. He had watched for weeks as his friend tortured himself with thoughts of the lives yet to be lost in Gévaudan, as if by his own hand, and he could watch no longer. Even at that moment, Fronsac's concentration and reputation were robbed by an inner battle to curb his every mad, violent impulse to rebel from the King's command and hasten back to place himself between the beast and every innocent life it would yet consume. Mani excused himself from the usual throng of half-admiring, half-resentful adversaries whose bruised pride and bruised bodies littered the ground around him, to stride down the open salle.

Mani approached to witness the moment when Fronsac's foil flew through the air, and his body tensed as if to strike his fencing partner, only to see the lines of his face deliberately relax and the roiling within him covered again by a rueful, self-deprecatory shake of his head. Resolved, Mani stepped into Fronsac's ring.

Chatter and laughter instantly surrounded them. Mani knew that even before Gévaudan the wagers would be in his favor, because only he had seen Fronsac in battle, and only he effortlessly detected the cracks in his friend's public face.

They began to circle each other, Fronsac moving stiffly, still holding his body to rigid fencing postures, but when Mani landed the first playful jab Fronsac shook off the momentary pain and his body melted into a stance well remembered by muscle and sinew. Mani grinned at the return of clarity to his friend's eyes and they began to move in synch once again on a tide of pent-up rage.

Ducking and leaping just out of range, Mani absorbed and rebounded Fronsac's long denied unrest until they both stooped with exhaustion and the last of their audience dispersed, yet it was still a penitent Fronsac who winced with greater regret at Mani's swollen cheek than at his own bruises when they returned that evening to the rooms they shared.

Fronsac busied himself gathering ointment and a washing basin, but when he knelt to tend Mani's face, Mani grasped his wrist and gently pried the towel from Fronsac's hand. Wordlessly he joined Fronsac on the ground and began to bathe and dress his friend's abrasions. As he worked he asked "Grégoire, do you remember cleansing the paint from my face during the war?"

Fronsac startled, and his pinched frown revealed the trespass of an unspoken taboo, "Of course." They could never forget any part of a war so brutally seared across their memories.

"And what did you think of then?" Mani asked, removing Fronsac's shirt to rinse away the sweat and blood beneath.

Fronsac inhaled sharply, and then ran his fingers delicately across Mani's bruised cheek in contemplation before answering. "We have never led quiet lives. I thought that should I be the first of us to die, there would be no one to wash away your mask and reveal you for the man beneath, the man you are."

Mani sighed in reply. "You have always honored me by understanding that I am a spiritual man and a man of wisdom, but the paint never masked my true nature, because I am that man as well. When I grew into my gifts I felt no contradiction between the paths of the spirit and the paths of the body. Yet in you I sense a great shame. For you the short sword, the épée, and the pistol are different - they strike with the skill of your mind - but you recoil from striking with the instincts of your body and spirit."

Raising the cloth once more, Mani smoothed a scrape along Fronsac's forearm and said, "I've not washed you to remove our fight from your body like a stain, but out of respect for these muscles, this skin, these bones, whose great strength you need never fear." Mani slid his hands down Fronsac's shoulders, molding them over the firm rises of his chest and over the shallow indentations of his abdomen, to then trace the leather clad length of his thighs and tug at the ties of his trousers. Pulling the tie entirely free and holding it between them like a question, Mani said, "Let me reacquaint you with your body."

Fronsac wasted no time on indecision, but silently followed Mani to his room, and the bed they shared.

Inside, Mani stood behind Fronsac and laid a steadying hand on his nape, letting his fingers ripple down a ladder of back bones, then return to nimbly unplait Fronsac's tight cue. Mani's sturdy hands framed Fronsac's face, massaging his temples and setting off a rush of warmth along his scalp, until his neck surrendered his head to Mani's safe-keeping and he lay back, held securely to Mani's shoulder by one hand while the other traced his lips, tickled his eyelashes, smoothed away the lines of his forehead, and marked his breath in the minute movements along the sides of his nose. Dropping from his face, Mani's wandering hand encircled his shoulders and they walked forward in tandem toward the bed where Fronsac flopped melodramatically forward, then suddenly rolled and pulled Mani to fall beside him when his friend leaned close in concern. Chuckling, they kissed in little pecks and bursts as untidy as their sprawl, then more deeply as they sobered.

Mani withdrew, leaving Fronsac lying sideways across the bed, shirtless, with his trousers gaping open and their tie dangling from his outstretched hand. Gazing at the ceiling, Fronsac counted hideous pink and orange tiles, an unfortunate side-effect of letting rooms in haste, until Mani, now naked, returned to his view and he counted instead the prongs of Mani's tattoo, the distance between his lips and his naval, the curve of his cock, and the length of soft leather in his hand fit to match the one in Fronsac's own. Mani slowly slid the tie from Fronsac's unresisting fingers, leaving a tingle across Fronsac's palm in its wake, and reached down to bind first one wrist, then the other to the thick oak bedposts.

They watched each other for long moments, Fronsac maintaining an expression of outward calm at odds with his increasingly shallow, rapid breaths, until finally he could no longer deny the rising agitation, and he strained and tugged at his bindings. Mani swung a leg over to straddle Fronsac's arched torso, and leaned low to catalogue every straining bulge of Fronsac's arms and neck with teasing lips and tongue. At his throat Mani nuzzled, and Fronsac replied with a strained growl, then Mani moved downwards to nip and pinch at Fronsac's peaked nipples.

Fronsac's body lifted off the bed in a bow, then collapsed into a fit of renewed struggles. He slid one leg beneath Mani's and for a moment two pair of thickly muscled thighs entangled and grappled. Mani gripped Fronsac's hips tightly between his knees, and touched his lips to Fronsac's breast bone, riding out the last of Fronsac's aggression, leaving nothing but a torn groan, and nervous quaking.

Mani slid down in a trail of trickling hair and blunt fingernails, and stripped Fronsac's trousers to settle between his legs. "Are you in your body now, Grégoire?" Mani asked, then locked his gaze with Fronsac's as he leaned down to engulf Fronsac's cock. Gasping, Fronsac's body roiled beneath him, but Mani met his every abortive thrust, running his thumbs along the pulsing muscles of his upper thighs. Although Fronsac's wrists ached, he could not help but pull again against the leather chords, torn between a desperate attempt to hold Mani to him, and pull him up to meet his lips with a frantic kiss, plumbing the depths of that devouring mouth. As the maddening bliss saturated every trembling corner of his being Fronsac hissed, "Mani," because he couldn't take it a second longer and yet needed so much more, but the man who met his every mood knew him too well, and had already released him to reach for a container under the bed. Returning, Mani blew cool air over the wet head of Fronsac's cock as he slid slick fingers into him, and Fronsac's toes curled and skittered along the slippery sheets for purchase.

"Are you here with me?" Mani asked. His body aflame and mind clear for the first time in weeks, Fronsac said "Always," and Mani took his lips in a furious kiss, then, as if in one movement, reached above him to release Fronsac's leaden arms from their ties, and braced himself to enter Fronsac in one smooth thrust.

Fronsac would no longer desire to hold himself in check, even if he still possessed the will. Instead he shouted and groaned, arched and shivered, and ran his tingling fingers along every inch of Mani's hot, slick skin that he could reach. He came with a rumbling moan, as the letters of Mani's name tumbled out of order, nonsensically, from his exhausted lips while Mani tensed and cried out above him.

As they lay, replete, their hair and breath mingling, Fronsac brought their clasped hands to his mouth and kissed the pads of Mani's fingers one at a time. He did not know what the next day might bring, if someone should die in Gévaudan, or if the King should send them far abroad to new horizons of discovery, or on a fool's errand to their deaths, but for now, entwined with a friend and lover who he gladly served in all things and who suited him above all others, Fronsac relaxed in contentment, because this was enough.


End file.
